Friday, December 15, 2006

Let there be no barrier to your Christmas joy. We hope that 2007 brings prosperity and peace...or at least a little good willSeasons Greetings, one and all(...and a nod to my favourite social researcher for sharing this postmodern image. Graphics are by Banksy, the radical Shoreditch UK graffiti artist, "vandalised oil painting 031"

A daytrip to what amounts to a Jerusalem suburb felt a bit like a mugging. First, the pimply security minders refused entry to our car and insisted that it was against the rules to take a rented vehicle beyond "the fence". "The rule of law will be enforced on my watch," insisted a youngster, caressing his rifle and refusing to look us in the eye. But he couldn't cite the regulation number (and , in fact, journalists technically are allowed to take rental cars inside.) He also refused to talk to any higher-ups on my phone, as it could be a risky ruse to blow him up, and he declined a suggestion to ring them up himself. We went across on foot. Sigh.

The bored Israeli visa stamper kept gabbing to her boyfriend on her cell phone, and we walked through a series of gates and x-rays until we got to the taxi stand on Palestinian turf.Here, the pace quickened. In the week before Christmas, traditionally high season in Bethlehem, the streets are echoingly empty. We were swarmed--and felt like hapless pigeons about to be plucked. Vendors and taxi drivers were cutting deals over imagined profiteering, and we turned out to be a bitter disappointment for not digging as deeply into our pockets as they had hoped. A Fatah cab driver and an armed Hamas trinket-seller quarreled over us.Santa Claus, strung up on a pole near the police station, looked rather like he was on the gallows.

Even inside the Church of the Nativity, the atmosphere felt tense. Impatient priests strongarmed visitors out of their way. Chanting and incense swining took precedence over gawkers. Thankfully, the line of Palestinians on the way out were courteous and extremely patient. They go through this twice a day, after all.

Answer a fool according to his folly

Click here for writer Israel Shamir's point by point Answer to a Jewish Chain Letter...one of those annoying screeds that brandish Jewish claims to the Palestinian territories.

otherwise occupied

Israeli Settlements

Homes in Judea and Samaria riddle the West Bank

Atheists on the bus - one way to eliminate Holy Wars. But godlessness is not an option for many people in our part of the world.

Glib Clips

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RULES OF THE GAME

Rule #1: In the Middle East, it is always the Palestinians that attack first, and it's always Israel who defends itself. This is called "retaliation".

Rule #2: The Palestinians are not allowed to kill Israelis. This is called "terrorism".

Rule #3: Israel has the right to kill Palestinian civilians; this is called "self-defense", or "collateral damage".

Rule #4: When Israel kills too many Palestinian civilians, the Western world calls for restraint. This is called the "reaction of the international community".

Rule #5: Palestinians do not have the right to capture Israeli military, not even 1 or 2.

Rule #6: Israel has the right to capture as many Palestinians as they want (over 10,000 to date being held without trial). There is no limit; there is no need for proof of guilt or trial. All that is needed is the magic word: "terrorism".

Rule #7: When you say "Hamas", always be sure to add "supported by Hezbollah, Syria and Iran".

Rule #8: When you say "Israel", never say "supported by the USA, the UK, European countries and even some Arab regimes", for people (God forbid) might believe this is not an equal conflict.

Rule #9: When it comes to Israel, don't mention the words "occupied territories", "UN resolutions", "Geneva conventions". This could distress the audience of Fox, CNN, etc.

Rule #10: Israelis tend to speak better English than Arabs. This is why it is called "balanced journalism".

Kudos for israelity bites

Time Magazine's Middle East blog cites israelity bites as "a personal favorite" , while the London Times and slate.com have linked to our recent scoops. Even got a plug from the Libertarian Popinjay of Las Vegas:)"a Middle Eastern website called 'Israelity Bites'. Brilliant! Comedians could learn from this url." And ironhead posted, "
If Israelitybites the blog says it, then I believe.LOL.The truth is out there..." Sarcastic? You be the judge.

entering Israel

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which cited statistics from the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, between 2000 and 2008, "Israeli soldiers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories killed more than 2,000 Palestinian civilians not involved in combat. Of 1,246 criminal investigations initiated during the same period into suspected offenses of all kinds by soldiers against Palestinian civilians, only 6 percent (78 cases) resulted in indictments. Only 13 of those indictments charged soldiers with killing civilians. As of September 2008, five soldiers had been convicted for the deaths of four civilians"

Like it?

Gush Shalom

subversive text? click to see

Talking Points

AA./ “I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places.” The Palestinian Authority has “an enormous desire to destroy Israel.” --Newt Gingrich

A./ "The UN was born of the ashes of the Holocaust and so was Israel... we have a lot in common." Chris Gunness, UNWRA

B./ “I don’t often spend the night in Jerusalem. I’ll go professionally or to see friends. It is hyperactive. Everyone is expecting something, either the messiah or disaster or both. Tel Aviv is becoming more and more Mediterranean, like the South of France, whereas Jerusalem is moving in the direction of, I don’t know where, maybe like Qum, in Iran.” --author Amos Oz in the New Yorker.

C./ "We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years, neither the United Nations, nor the U.S.A, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” Ariel Sharon to Winston S. Churchill III in 1973.

D./The world will judge the Jewish state by the way it will treat the Arabs." --Chaim Weizmann, father of modern Zionism.

E./"Obama and I don't just share a home state. We also share exotic names that were given to us by our fathers--Barack, which in Swahili means 'blessed,' and Rahm, which, roughly translated from Hebrew, means 'go screw yourself.'"--Rahm Emanuel, WHite House CHief of Staff

G./ "Israel is the country of immigrants and refugees, survivors and displaced people from all over the world. We weren't occupiers, and we didn't want to be occupiers. We were thrown into a historic situation that we have not managed to get out of. We are a torn nation. The occupation is destroying us. We have no right to control another nation. Our leaders and the leaders of the Palestinian people must do everything to get out of this situation." --Eli Amir, Israeli author

H./"It isn't easy to love Israel and it isn't easy to be a friend of Israel. I must personally admit that I love Israel even when I can't stand it. It's no coincidence that during a year when it's tough to love Israel, it's easier to love its literature. Israeli literature delivers the bill to the Israeli people - for the subjugation of the Palestinians, the occupation, the wars, the internal social injustices, book after book, creation after creation." --Amoz Oz, novelist

I./ "My message to the international community is that our silence and complicity, especially on the situation in Gaza, shames us all. It is almost like the behaviour of the military junta in Burma ."--Desmond Tutu, Nobel Laureate

J./ Sticker on a tour bus in Jerusalem filled with American Jews: "No one belongs here more than you!"

K./ "My pet peeve is nuclear war."-- Dick Cavett

L./ “People say to me, "What about Gaza? Don't have so much compassion for them, don't tell the Israelis to be nice there, tell [the Palestinians] to be nice there. And I say Gaza is a nightmare, and it's a stain on my conscience. And I'm very troubled by the attitude of Israelis against Israeli Arabs. It's a shame. It's a black hole in my democracy.”--Avram Burg

M./"My grandmother was ill in bed when the Naziscame to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers."-- Sir Gerald Kaufman, British MP and Orthodox Jew.

N./ Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus' -- blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel, which flatly and explicitly reject the right of Palestinians to self-determination. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.--Noam Chomsky

O./ He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Micah 4:3

P./ Purple, The Color.Author Alice Walker, from Gaza with Code Pink, says:"It's very important that they understand what is happening, and that we hold our own administration accountable.I feel that what is happening in the Middle East is very important because the situation is so volatile. "I love people, and I love children and I feel that the Palestinian child is just as precious as the African-American child, as the Jewish child."

Q./"There are of course Jews who are non-Zionists and even anti-Zionists. The ultra-Orthodox cult of Neturei Karta and the leftist cult of Noam Chomsky are notable examples. The former rejects any earthly attempt to interfere with God's messianic plan, while the latter abhors all forms of nationalism, especially successful ones." --Judea Pearl

R./ "There are two sides in the Middle East conflict: Jews and Arabs who want compromise, and Jews and Arabs who want to demonize and eradicate their neighbors." --Rob Eshman, the editor of LA's the Jewish Journal

S./ "There hasn't been a single Israeli government that has curbed illegal colonization of the West Bank. I have a hard time believing the "center" of Israeli politics is anything other than a black hole -- an event horizon beyond which no light can ever shine outward. All it does is keep sucking more into it and crushing it." --chaos 4700 on HuffPo

U./ "The Middle East is the worst place in which to set loose a military force even partly informed by Christian Zionism, seeing the state of Israel as God's instrument for ushering in the Messianic Age - damning Muslims, while defending Jews for the sake of their eventual destruction...Unbound Christian zealotry is inimical to the prudent use of force...made blind by faith." --James Carroll

V./ Palestinians shoot themselves in the foot and then Israel shoots them in the other foot because they fired first.-- Avi, a blogger

W./ "This was not a love boat, this was a boat of hate," Bibi Netanyahu said of the Turkish ferry, Mavi Marmara, raided by Israeli commandos.

X./ "The number of murders per capita is a third of that of the United States. Israel’s population has passed 7.5 million, more than nine times what it was at its birth in 1948, and is growing at 1.8 percent a year, a rate no other developed country approaches." --Ethan Bronner, NY Times

Y./ Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak to commandos involved in the flotilla raid when he visited them at their base in Atlit: "We live in the Middle East, in a place where there is no mercy for the weak and there aren't second chances for those who don't defend themselves."

Z./"Israel goes to sleep with memories of the Holocaust and wakes up to the Arab-Israeli conflict." Maxim

AA./ "In 1974 US foreign aid amounted to about 25 percent of Israeli gross domestic product (GDP). The aid has continued at roughly the same level, but given the massive growth of the Israeli economy, it now amounts to about 2.5 percent of Israeli GDP." George Friedman, Stratfor. That's alot of shekels!

BB./ "Why doesn't Netanyahu get it over with?Remove the Star of David and blue bars from the Israeli flag and hoist up the Jolly Roger. Piracy pays." - Stanley Heller

CC./ "Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.” Tony Judt

DD./ "Most Israelis were not transplanted latter-day agrarian socialists but young, prejudiced urban Jews who differed from their European or American counterparts chiefly in their macho, swaggering self-confidence, and access to weapons." --Tony Judt

EE./ "The Israeli policy of amimut, or opacity, prohibits acknowledging the existence of the country’s nuclear arsenal, which consists of more than 100 weapons, mainly two-stage thermonuclear devices, capable of being delivered by missile, fighter-bomber, or submarine (two of which are said by intelligence sources to be currently positioned in the Persian Gulf)." --Jeffrey Goldberg

FF./"Why should a bourgeois country be the world’s foremost recipient of foreign aid, with $3 billion a year from the United States? Why [does] Israel keep schnorring money from Diaspora Jews, and why [do] Diaspora Jews keep handing it over?”--Larry Derfner

GG./ "Many students of Jewish descent, myself included, conclude after majoring in Middle Eastern studies that Israel's post-1967 conduct and its attempt to paint its own colonialist ambitions as a universal Jewish concern constitute an affront to Jewish values and a chillul Hashem." --Evan Sholle

HH./ "We operate everywhere where we can hit terror infrastructure - in close places and in places further away." --Ehud Olmert

II./ "Israeli religious extremists demand American protection and then denounce the U.S. for 'interference' if we demur politely about colonization of the West Bank. " Christopher Hitchens